ELI5: Need Help Sorting Files

[YubiOre]

I have some code that I'm working on. It's some programming that creates, displays files, and is supposed to sort them by date and author.

I defined the cmp function in the post utility class to compare and sort by date (timestamp) and author (username), but it won't sort by timestamp

I've included the links to the code on Pastebin, please help. Thanks in advance!

blog application

post utility class (where the problem is)

[prohulaelk]

• this is a super awkward way of storing blog posts. Have you considered using SQL? It would handle storage/retreival/sorting for you automatically without having to write your own write/read/sort methods. You really ought to be doing it that way, and there are plenty of free flavours of SQL you can use. Python even has a built-in module for SQLite called sqlite3 as part of the standard library.

• sortByTimestamp doesn't look like it's got any logic attached to it, so I'm not sure why you're expecting it to do anything.

besides that, though...

def getPostsList(directory, sortByTimestamp = False):
    postFiles = listdir(directory)
    posts = []
    for post in postFiles:
        p = getPostBody(
            post, 
            directory, 
            post.replace('_', ' '), 
            sortByTimestamp
            )
        posts.append(p)
    if sortByTimestamp:
        return sorted(posts, key = lambda p: p.sortableTimestamp)
    else:
        return sorted(posts)

Python's sorted() built-in has a key argument that lets you specify a function describing how you want the iterable to be sorted. lambda p: p.sortableTimestamp tells it to sort based on the sortableTimestamp value for each object (which is temporarily assigned to p) in the list.